Two startling innovations were utilized by The Factory last night in order to woo audiences away from Hamlet’s reputation as ‘The Gloomy Dane’*. One was to have a woman play Hamlet; the other was to invite the audience to provide all the props. This meant that the actors were constantly improvising their moves and interactions, and that no two instances of this performance will ever be the same. Last night, for example, the climactic duel between Hamlet and Laertes was fought with bananas and ‘a very palpable hit’ was achieved by stuffing a piece of banana into one’s opponent’s mouth. The wandering players who mime Hamlet Senior’s murder were actually members of the audience, whose bemused attempts to enact the narration were indeed gigglesome. By these means the company managed to keep the attention of my teenage daughter riveted on the stage for almost three hours and provide her with several good laughs.

The Factory is a small company dedicated to introducing spontaneity and unpredictability into the theatre, and I understand that any of them can play any part on any given evening, so it might all be different tomorrow. They are very brave and inventive chaps who claim to like the look of terror in an actor’s eyes when that actor is not rehearsed into a perfect comfort zone and can’t control what will happen next. It makes for a very high-energy performance, is entertaining, amusing and engaging.

It’s not the smallest bit tragic, but as I’m sure you all know, three hours of unrelieved tragedy can be a tad draining. And what can you do with Hamlet that hasn’t already been done? Contemporary audiences are unlikely to be terrified by the spooky goings-on, or stimulated by the violence, or thrilled by the political nuances of Claudius’s entrapment, or moved by Hamlet’s extensive navel-gazing, or made uneasy by his obsessive imagining of his mother’s sex life. So why not mix it up a little? Productions of Hamlet I’ve seen in the past have often seemed to so overcome by reverence and so hung up on trying to make Hamlet’s agony real that they can’t breathe life into this massive juggernaut of a play (‘Shakespeare’s greatest work’). There is much to be said for blowing it wide open. I should add that The Factory does respect the text, though there were a couple of mistakes last night, probably thanks to the aforementioned terror and stress, but you can see that every actor is hugely committed and throws themselves into it. Could have been a train-wreck; wasn’t. 

I would recommend it to anyone interested in theatrical experiments, or owning a teen who’s never seen Hamlet (or the inside of Blackwell’s Bookshop, which totally blew her mind). If you go, do try to bring a really unusual and interesting prop – challenge those actors!

* Hamlet was called this before Kirkegaard or Hans Christian Andersen - unlike most of Shakespeare’s tragedies, it is notably lacking in laughs.